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A decade into the Trump era, there are a few rules that should, by now, be common sense for navigating the chaos. One of them, of course, is not to assume that America’s most fact-challenged President is telling the truth. The war in Iran “has been won,” he said on Tuesday, while at the same time deploying thousands of U.S. troops to the Middle East, presumably to be available in case the war needs winning again. (If only his constant declarations of victory really meant that the conflict was over.) Another is to pay close attention to the things that he is fulminating about late at night or early in the morning. Donald Trump’s posts—in all their voluminous, all-caps fervor—represent as close as it gets to the pure id of an American President. Sleepless Trump is the true Trump. He may not always act on his rants, but they are more than simply a catalogue of what pisses him off. Think of them as a guide to what he would do if he could just do whatever he wanted.

This is why America’s friends in Europe—and elsewhere, too, for that matter—ought to take note of what the President said at 6:16 A.M. on Thursday, when he started his day by denouncing not only the ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic but the nations of NATO that have so far refused to join the U.S. in its war on Iran. “The U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO, BUT ‘NEVER FORGET’ THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME!” he wrote on Truth Social. A few hours later, at a Cabinet meeting, he returned to the subject of his faithless allies. “We’re very disappointed with NATO, because NATO has done absolutely nothing,” he said. “I said twenty-five years ago that NATO’s a paper tiger, but more importantly that we’ll come to their rescue, but they’ll never come to ours.” In other words, he was right all along: America never should have trusted those Europeans. Asking for their help reopening the Strait of Hormuz, he added, was a “test.” And they had failed. “I believe that’s going to cost them dearly,” he said. Various thinly veiled threats followed about how “Ukraine’s not our war,” and why, really, the U.S. shouldn’t bother protecting Europe from Russia, given the “big, fat, beautiful ocean” standing between America and Vladimir Putin’s legions.

I suspect I was not the only person who thought this sounded like the language of a man whose next call might be to his divorce lawyer. It would certainly be bizarre if the breakup finally happened over a war of choice in the Middle East, launched by a President who came into office vowing not to start new wars in the Middle East. (See Rule No. 1.) But, even if no one specifically predicted that a crisis with Iran might lead to the sundering of NATO, we can hardly say we weren’t warned: whether Trump follows through or not, he has spent much of the past decade publicly blustering about ending things with NATO, looking for pretexts to do so and actively alienating America’s partners in the seventy-six-year-old alliance.

In January, he even threatened to seize Greenland by force from Denmark, a threat so shocking—even if it shouldn’t have been—that many European leaders agreed with the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, who used his speech at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, to proclaim the end of the “pleasant fiction” that there was still such a thing as a U.S.-led liberal international order. As for Europe’s top security priority, helping Ukraine beat back Russia’s invasion, Trump has already ended all direct U.S. military assistance to Kyiv; repeatedly blamed the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, rather than Putin, for the failure of U.S.-led peace talks; and, just this week, according to Zelensky, told Ukraine that it should agree to give away territory in the Donbas to Russia, in exchange for vague U.S. security guarantees. On Thursday, even as Trump was railing about NATO, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was considering diverting urgently needed weapons for Ukraine—which have been paid for by Europeans—to the Middle East.

At the same time, Russia, despite supplying Iran with both drones and targeting intelligence in its war against the U.S., has emerged as a major economic beneficiary of the conflict, with the Trump Administration announcing that it would temporarily lift sanctions on some Russian oil to help ease the supply crisis that its attack on Iran has created. (If the war ends by April, a study by the Kyiv School of Economics found, that decision would mean an eighty-four-billion-dollar windfall in export earnings for Moscow.) So Trump’s war, in effect, is now also funding Putin’s war. How’s that as a message to our allies?

During Trump’s first term, the establishment types, who coexisted uneasily in a White House with Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and other characters from the MAGA-rally stage, used to push back when Trump’s frequent bashing of U.S. allies and alliances was pointed out. One of the most enduring images of Trump’s tenure was from his first overseas trip, in the spring of 2017, when, at a NATO summit in Brussels, he shoved the leader of the tiny country of Montenegro aside in an apparent effort to better position himself for the cameras. At that same summit, the President, who had campaigned as a NATO skeptic—“Here’s the problem with NATO,” he said in 2016, “it’s obsolete”—changed his speech, at the last minute, to omit any mention of America’s commitment to the Article 5 pledge of mutual defense that is at the heart of the alliance.

Worried about the backlash, two of Trump’s more conventionally conservative aides—his national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster, and his chief White House economic adviser, Gary Cohn—teamed up on Air Force One to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on the way back to Washington. It was headlined “America First Doesn’t Mean America Alone.” The article became, in its way, an instant classic: an inversion of truth that proved the point it was meant to dispute. It was a perfect shorthand for the kind of rationales we were hearing every day from the rear-guard remnants of the pre-Trump Republican Party: He didn’t say what he said! He doesn’t want to do what he says he wants to do!

Rereading it now, when the Republican establishment is no more, and Trump’s White House is filled with sycophants who make his first-term officials seem like paragons of principle, the piece comes across not as parody so much as self-fulfilling prophesy: all that effort by Trump’s aides to pretend that he was not exactly who we knew him to be has, finally, fallen away. If anything, that long-ago Wall Street Journal piece can now be read as a sort of playbook in reverse for Trump 2.0. “Strong alliances bolster American power,” Cohn and McMaster wrote, and the President, they claimed, was deeply committed to “fostering cooperation and strengthening relationships with our allies and partners.”

In late 2018, another of Trump’s first-term appointees, the retired four-star Marine general Jim Mattis, famously quit the Cabinet in a dispute over Trump’s mistreatment of America’s partners in Syria, saying in a resignation letter that the U.S. could not continue to lead in the world “without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.” It is not a coincidence that Mattis has now emerged as one of the most vocal former Trump officials to question his conduct of the war with Iran, the “delusional nonsense” of his demands for regime change, and the negative consequences of it all for America’s place in the world. “You can’t bring allies on board if they don’t trust you,” Mattis told PBS’s Margaret Hoover this week. Exactly. ♦

On a bright-blue morning in July, 2023, a team of researchers took off in a catamaran from the island of Dominica in search of sperm whales. Sperm whales communicate via bursts of clicks, called codas, and the researchers—part of a project called the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or CETI—are hoping one day to decipher what the codas mean. On this particular morning, they were looking to attach an electronic tag to a whale so they could record both its clicks and its movements.

After a couple of hours, they happened upon eleven sperm whales, bunched closely together at the surface. This behavior was odd enough that the researchers dropped their plan to tag a whale. They launched a pair of camera-equipped drones to hover above the group. After another hour or so, a great cloud of blood swirled through the water. Then a new gray head appeared. Thanks to a crazily unlikely accident, the researchers had witnessed a sperm-whale birth and had managed to videotape the entire event.

Thanks to another crazy accident, I was onboard the catamaran that day. Not only did I get to witness the birth but also I got to watch the normally sober-minded researchers react to it. The scene on the deck resembled something out of the Marx Brothers. Everyone raced to the front of the boat to get a better view. “Oh, my God,” one of the scientists said, clutching his head. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

“Holy fucking shit,” another exclaimed.

For the next two hours, the whales remained bunched together. They seemed to be nudging the baby around, but what, exactly, was going on was hard to say from the vantage of the catamaran.

The researchers spent almost two years analyzing the drone footage, applying machine learning in combination with good, old-fashioned field biology. Today, they released a pair of papers chronicling what happened that July morning, one in the journal Science, the other in Scientific Reports. Their findings suggest that the whales offered the calf’s mother a level of assistance that puts midwifery to shame.

“I think it’s very enlightening to see another species working with such coöperation and care for their group,” Project CETI’s founder, David Gruber, who teaches biology at the City University of New York, told me. “Meanwhile, we do horrible things to each other. So there’s something to learn from them.”

Sperm whales have the largest brains of any creature on Earth. (These can weigh up to twenty pounds.) They are also highly social animals. Females travel together in groups that may include anywhere from a few to a few dozen members, and they share child-rearing duties. Male calves remain with their group until they are about fifteen years old; after that, they lead solitary lives and approach female groups only to mate.

Though sperm whales are highly mobile—they can travel tens of thousands of miles in a single year—the ones that frequent the waters off Dominica return often enough that scientists have been able to determine which whales hang out together. (Individuals can be identified by the shapes of their flukes.)

From the drone footage, which captured the moment the baby whale’s fluke first emerged, the researchers were able to determine that a whale named Rounder was the mother. Rounder is a member of a social group called Unit A, which consists of two families that are not closely related. Rounder’s family includes her mother and her half sister. The other includes an older whale named Fruit Salad, along with Fruit Salad’s daughter and granddaughter.

When sperm-whale calves are born, weighing about a ton, they are pretty helpless. They can’t immediately swim—their flukes are bent from being cramped in the womb—and, to use the technical term, they are “negatively buoyant.” Left to their own devices, they will sink. What the footage showed is that, for the first three hours of the newborn’s life, the members of Unit A took turns keeping it afloat. At times, they nestled so close to the baby that they formed a sort of raft beneath it. At other points, they carried the calf draped over their enormous heads.

“There were several times when the newborn whale was nearly completely out of the water,” the Scientific Reports paper notes. All the members of Unit A participated in the effort to prevent the baby from drowning, but a few—including the calf’s mother and her half sister, Aurora—took leading roles. More surprisingly, the core group also included a member of the second family, Fruit Salad’s granddaughter, Ariel.

“For a long time, there has been this underlying hypothesis that the reason that sperm-whale females live as a family is the need to communally defend and raise a calf,” Shane Gero, who is Project CETI’s lead field biologist and one of the authors of both papers, told me. “But there’s never really been good evidence, scientifically speaking, of something that would count as coöperation, where there’s a cost involved between non-kin that are living together. I think this shows that, during birth events, non-kin coöperate in a way that is both costly and that requires some kind of logging of social behavior, like, You helped me last time, I’ll help you this time.”

Another finding that surprised (and touched) the researchers was that Rounder’s fifteen-year-old half brother, Allan, showed up for the birth. Allan has been separating from Unit A for several years, but, like many a human teen-ager, he seems unsure about whether he’s really ready to live on his own. Allan remained at the periphery of the group during most of the post-delivery activity, but he did eventually get close enough to touch the newborn.

“To me this shows that there’s a lasting bond between these animals—a social memory across time,” Gero said.

Earlier, members of Project CETI found that they could predict when sperm whales were likely to dive based on the sequence of codas they had exchanged. Before, during, and after the birth, the researchers were recording the interactions of Unit A via hydrophones—basically, underwater microphones. They found that the whales’ “vocal style” changed during the birth and also when a group of potentially threatening pilot whales showed up. What the sperm whales were “talking” about, however, remains to be decoded.

“It’s an incredibly complex data set that is filled with all these nuances,” Gruber said. “But that’s kind of good. Because right now we’re still working on the baby slope, but this kind of shows us what the double black diamond is.” ♦

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The K-pop group BTS—by many metrics, the most popular band of all time—had a meteoric ascent before its members were called away by South Korea’s mandatory military service. Now, nearly four years later, the group has returned with a new record, “Arirang.” On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz delve into the album as well as the live-streamed concert and documentary that have accompanied its release, both on Netflix. “Arirang” is being framed as a return to the group’s Korean roots, albeit one that signifies a new, more mature era for its members, who are now in their late twenties and early thirties. The hosts consider BTS’s meticulously crafted image and its relationship to its devoted followers, known as ARMY. Intense fandom is nothing new—just ask the Beatles—but K-pop stans are particularly invested in the lives (and livelihoods) of their favorite idols, even paying for the chance to message them directly. “This further privatization of what we call parasociality,” Cunningham says, “if that can be monetized and organized, it really is the final frontier of the pop star.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

BTS’s “Arirang”
“BTS: The Return” (2026)
“KPop Demon Hunters” (2025)
Justin Bieber’s “Swag”
“The K-Pop King,” by Alex Barasch (The New Yorker)
The music video for BTS’s “Swim”
“Judy Blume: A Life,” by Mark Oppenheimer
The Beatles’ “Let It Be”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

“They gave me a list of names to choose. ‘Sir, you could pick the name you’d like, sir.’ I said, ‘The name of what?’ ‘The name of the attack on Iran, sir.’ And they gave me, like, twenty names. And I'm, like, falling asleep. I didn't like any of them. Then I see ‘Epic Fury.’ I said, ‘I like that name! I like that name!’ ” —Donald Trump.

The twenty runners-up:

Operation Homeric Fury

Operation Classic Fury

Operation Instant Classic Fury

Operation Tumescent Fury

Operation Long-Fingered Fury

Operation Much Fury

Operation People Are Saying It’s Fury

Operation Bomb-a-Lago

Operation Golf-Course Grave

Operation Trump: The War

Operation Gulf War III

Operation Venezuela 2: Atomic Boogaloo

Operation This Time It’s the One That Ends in “N,” Not “Q”

Operation You’re Welcome, Bibi

Operation Billions Up in Smoke

Operation DTF w/ Tehran

Operation and You Thought the East Wing Took a Hit

Operation You’re Welcome, Vlad

Operation Jeffrey Who?

Operation Because I Can ♦